Dossier mode
Surveillance State(s) and the Criminalization of Dissent
The hub, restaged as a presenter deck: the pattern it keeps finding, the cases on the record, and the questions still open. The roster reads from the live index, so it stays current as investigations land. Open the full hub.
Surveillance State(s)
State surveillance keeps widening. Privacy keeps shrinking. And the legal definition of dissent keeps moving closer to the legal definition of terrorism.
Surveillance capabilities that would have been considered constitutionally intolerable in 2001 are now routine.
Protest activities considered constitutionally protected in 2010 are now prosecuted as terrorism-adjacent in 2026.
What this hub is, and is not.
- A working record, not a finished thesis.
- Each investigation is graded on its own evidence.
- The point is not that a single conspiracy runs all of this. The point is that enough well-documented cases in one place make the pattern hard to explain away.
Surveillance rarely gives itself back.
Capability granted for one emergency is retained after the emergency ends, and the burden falls on the public to argue it away.
The people who build the systems overlap with the people who oversee them.
The vendor bench and the oversight bench draw from the same personnel pool, so review is rarely adversarial.
Data crosses jurisdictional lines it was not supposed to cross.
Collection authorized in one jurisdiction, for one purpose, turns up in another. Sanctuary protections and export limits both leak.
Terrorism law is now doing work speech law used to do.
Conduct once handled as protest or publication is charged under statutes written for political violence.
Palantir was founded 2003–2005 with early backing from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm.
The founding and the In-Q-Tel investment are documented in the company's own filings and public corporate history.
Palantir has held ICE contracts for eleven years, across ICM, TECS, and FALCON.
The contracting record runs continuously from 2014 and is documented in federal procurement reporting.
ImmigrationOS was awarded to Palantir on April 17, 2025 as a $30 million no-bid contract.
The award, its value, and its no-bid status are on the federal procurement record.
The New York Times reported a Palantir-built master database of Americans. Palantir publicly rebutted it.
The reporting and the rebuttal are both on the record. The underlying architecture claim is not independently established.
Palantir entered a strategic partnership with Israel's Ministry of Defense, announced after a January 2024 board meeting held in Tel Aviv.
Announced by Palantir in its own investor communications.
Flock Safety operates a private automated licence-plate-reader layer sitting underneath the public one.
Documented in the company's own funding and product announcements.
Louis Mosley, grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, runs Palantir's UK and Europe business.
The appointment and the family lineage are both matters of public record.
Palantir's market capitalisation places it among the most valuable companies in the sector.
Public market data.
David Sacks went from PayPal COO to White House AI and Crypto Czar.
The appointment is on the public record.
Sacks's Craft Ventures holdings stood to benefit from policy he was positioned to influence.
Documented in New York Times reporting on White House profits.
Joe Lonsdale co-founded Palantir and funds the Cicero Institute and America PAC.
Founding role and political funding are both publicly documented.
Keith Rabois has given $9.3 million to Republican causes since 2022.
Federal campaign finance disclosures.
Roelof Botha, grandson of apartheid foreign minister Pik Botha, leads Sequoia Capital.
The lineage and the role are both on the public record.
Reid Hoffman is the counter-example in this network, and drew DOJ scrutiny of his own.
Included because the pattern is not uniform. Donation record is public.
More than fifty US cities have cancelled or suspended Flock contracts since 2025.
Aggregated from local reporting across jurisdictions. No single authoritative registry exists.
At least twenty Georgia police officers have been fired or arrested for using Flock to track people personally.
Documented in Georgia local reporting and departmental disciplinary records.
Local police departments have given ICE and CBP access to Flock data despite state and local sanctuary rules.
Documented in audit logs and local reporting. This is the jurisdictional-leak pattern the hub tracks.
The Special Demonstration Squad infiltrated the UK anti-apartheid movement for twenty-five years, monitoring Peter Hain's family among others.
Confirmed by the Undercover Policing Inquiry's published evidence.
Special Branch and MI5 agreed in August 1968 to share intelligence on political activists, and SDS reporting was routinely copied to MI5.
The information-sharing agreement is documented in UCPI-published memoranda.
Whether MI5 passed SDS intelligence to apartheid South Africa's Bureau of State Security remains SOME SMOKE, not FACT.
The hub holds this line deliberately. The Inquiry has not resolved it.
At least 1,400 self-identified Unit 8200 alumni work in US tech, and five alumni-founded companies carry a combined market cap near $160 billion.
Compiled from public professional-network data and company market capitalisations.
The cases on the record. Each opens in a new tab.
- Thiel's Foreign Policy ↗▶FACT
- The Shopping Cart ↗▶FACT
- Unit 8200: the Israeli military-intelligence unit that became the founding class of the American cybersecurity industry ↗▶FACT
- The Palmer Raids: how a 1919 dragnet built the first federal domestic-radical index and the operational template that followed ↗▶FACT
- Ban Flock, Buy Axon ↗▶FACT
- Rubio and Miller Convene 65 Nations to Redefine Left-Wing Dissent as Terrorism ↗▶FACT
- Nine Protesters at a Texas ICE Jail Got 562 Years Combined. Here Is Every Sentence and Every Charge. ↗▶FACT
- The First Test Case: Washington Seeks Fergie Chambers's Extradition From Spain Over Hamas-Linked Money Laundering Charges ↗▶FACT
- A Presidential Memo Made Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Christianity Terrorism "Indicators." The Grant Money Follows. ↗▶FACT
- A 66-Year-Old Peace Professor Protested Stephen Miller. The FBI, the Secret Service, and a House Subpoena Followed. ↗▶FACT
- A Tax Committee Subpoenaed an Independent Newsroom — and Its Own Letters Read on the Outlet's Journalism. ↗▶SOME SMOKE
- They Walk Among Us: criminality inside the immigration-enforcement workforce ↗▶FACT
- Toka: the Israeli firm that sells governments the ability to alter camera footage, and the American venture capital that funds it ↗▶FACT
- The Panther/US letters: how the FBI wrote forged death threats between two Black organizations and watched the bodies fall ↗▶FACT
- The UK Banned Palestine Action as a Terrorist Group After a Paint Attack on Two RAF Planes ↗▶FACT
- “Limit the First Amendment” ↗▶PROBABLY TRUE
- Paragon Solutions: Ehud Barak's third surveillance venture, run by a former Unit 8200 commander, now inside US immigration enforcement ↗▶FACT
- A Hacker at the Voting-Rights Desk ↗▶SOME SMOKE
- A Million a Day ↗▶SOME SMOKE
- PROMIS and the Maxwell distribution: an intellectual-property theft, a suspect backdoor, and a media baron with intelligence ties ↗▶SOME SMOKE
Dulcie September was shot dead outside her Paris office in 1988. Who killed her is still unknown.
The identity of the gunman, or the Thomson-CSF material she was investigating. The French case closed non-lieu in 1992.
Help us fill it →Whether Palantir's architecture descends from DARPA's cancelled Total Information Awareness program is unresolved.
Primary sources on the personnel and contracting genealogy. Our position: the genealogy is documentable, but 'direct descendant' overstates the record.
Help us fill it →Whether MI5 passed SDS intelligence on the UK anti-apartheid movement to Pretoria remains the central unresolved question.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry has not answered it. We are monitoring subsequent tranche reports and Home Office FOIA disclosures.
Help us fill it →The US media outlets named at the July 2026 State Department ministerial are not on the public record.
The list of outlets named alongside designated foreign terrorist organizations, per participant accounts.
Help us fill it →Whether 1,400+ Unit 8200 alumni in US cybersecurity are a counterintelligence risk, rather than simply a workforce pipeline, is unaddressed.
A public position from the US intelligence community. We are collecting sources.
Help us fill it →The full arrest docket under the UK's Palestine Action proscription is not yet public.
Total arrests, prosecution outcomes, and appellate challenges since the July 5, 2025 Home Office proscription.
Help us fill it →Why it matters now.
Every case in this hub was legal when it happened, or was made legal afterwards. The pattern is not that the rules were broken. It is that the rules moved, quietly, and mostly without a vote.
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenThe identity of Dulcie September's killer, and the Thomson-CSF material she was investigating.
- OpenPrimary sources resolving the Palantir/Total Information Awareness genealogy.
- OpenWhether MI5 or Special Branch materially passed SDS intelligence to South Africa's Bureau of State Security.
- OpenThe list of US media outlets named at the July 2026 political-terrorism ministerial.